finding her feet – faute de mieux

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Today. Maybe, tomorrow. One day I am going to leave you and wouldn’t give you a clue. I’m burning all the letters that ever passed between us, one at a time. The letters you sent that summer you were abroad boning that older woman while writing about how much you missed me. The letters you sent from college while you were still figuring out if you’d fallen in love with me. The letters you sent, while you were trying hard to be a kid at heart, from home where you were catching your breath mostly. I tore up all our pictures in half. I flushed down all the little trinkets you called ‘twinkly valentine gifts’ and shed one solid tear to go along. I’m making fast and steady progress, don’t you think? The kids, well, expired. I wonder if you remember how many there were. One sultry Sunday evening we gave birth to four, lying on our bare backs, under the stars. We squeezed in one more a little later that night, and you declared, “let’s have a glorious bundle of five, not four,” because there was still space for one more in the imaginary crib and the imaginary car and we were young enough to accommodate, if only in imagination. It’s not like I had to drown them in the bathtub or anything. I don’t think of them and they don’t exist therefore. One way or another, the physical objects and the imaginary ones are shown the exit door. What would I do with the memories though? They stick on to me like skin. Last Sunday the skin on my fingers got burnt by accident on a hot plate. It pained like hell that day. Over the last one week I couldn’t feel anything on those burnt parts of my hand. But, today when I woke up I saw the skin on those fingers started peeling off painlessly. How do I make the same happen to my memories of you, and your letters, and your trinkets and the babies?
I’m positive I’ll figure out a way soon and the day I do that I would leave you without giving you a clue, just the way you did.

Susanna, sixteen and sweet as honeyloved a boy in her Spanish class.Cute he was, hadn’t much money,but soon exchanged rings of brass.Features fine, manners he lacked many;soon into his grave she let him pass!

A pleasant gentleman made her stopat his backyard daily where his roses grew.He too watched, shyly, at her coffee shoppretty Susanna who was nearly twenty-two.Married when, in a letter, the question popp’dbut his laconic love made poison bid him adieu!

Touring the world, she met a rich man;talkative, humorous, a handsome Dutch.A man of many hobbies – he wrote,swam,ran…He loved to talk – of his hobbies and such;She wedded him when they visited Japan;also, aptly silenced him as he talked too much!

Forty and pretty, love she did crave;found a doctor, her suitor, lovable for sure.After marriage, more and more love he gave,said often, “For my sadness, it’s the cure…”till the day she plonked him into his grave.She thought his love too selfish to endure!

For a very brief period, she married a professor-a scientist, genius, unselfish, naive-for he said, “Marry me now,” in a puerile mannerand waited very long, from husband one to five.At the end of a month, she, with an electric driller,bored him to death – as he did, in a way, when alive!

The last of her husbands, but not the least-he loved her in a way she hadn’t known before…Sixty, as old as she, handsome, was a holy priest;Prince Charming was he, the stuff of folklore.Not a day into wedlock he was among the deceased…because true love they finally got; and so, she too was no more!

P.S. The inspiration to write on this particular subject came from the title of one of Ruskin Bond’s short stories, ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’, on which the yet to be released Bollywood flick, ‘7 Khoon Maaf’ is supposedly based. Though I don’t know a single detail further about the short story as such, I picked up hints from the promos of the film (of it being a dark comedy, of there being murders of husbands etc. ) to conjure up this amateurish play of words to convey my own imagination of a dark story about Susanna’s seven husbands.

P.P.S. Happy Valentine’s Day. This is the primary inspiration to write about love. It had to be dark because it’s my blog and today I celebrate the first anniversary of my blog.